Cognitive dissonance provides a model for understanding how we
experience film texts as profound. This article looks at the ways in which
filmmakers might motivate or exploit the pleasure of resolving familiar narrative
dissonance to inspire emotions associated with profundity, sublimity,
or transcendence. David Lynch scholarship provides a primary case study in
the conflation of cognitive dissonance and transcendence, however it is contended
that moral obligations to rape and trauma victims are sublimated in
the process. Alternative moral dissonances across a range of different cinematic
modes are subsequently addressed. Comparative analysis of vigilantism
in American revenge and “social cleansing” films, Ken Loach’s social realism,
Richard Linklater’s Bernie (2011), and John Sayles’s Lone Star (1996) permits an
exploration of variability in filmic dissonance and narrative comprehension,
as well as alternative approaches to filmmaking ethics and responsibility. The
article concludes with suggestions for an applied ethics extended from cognitive
film theory.